(Natural News) Wouldn't it be great to be able to regrow your teeth in ways that are similar to your hair and nails? Of course it would, but unfortunately, human bodies just aren't built like that.

Last year, however, a team of researchers led by Paul Sharpe, a bioengineer at King's College London, managed to discover a method that allows teeth to regrow themselves, making the use of synthetic fillers to patch them up completely unnecessary. According to a report on the study, scientists might eventually view it as one of the most important advances in the field of dentistry if it ever becomes widespread and standardized.

The basis of the method discovered by the researchers is none other than the fact that teeth already have the ability to heal themselves, albeit only slightly. It's said that teeth can function just like human skin in some ways, able to repair minor damage all the time by themselves, without the need for any forms of treatment.

However, the problem is that major damage or injury in teeth make it largely impossible for any self-repair mechanisms to kick in, and that's why most people get cavities instead. In order to fix this, Sharpe and his team thought that it could be useful to mobilize stem cells in the dental pulp and boost the natural healing abilities of teeth. Their work was built on top of earlier research, where it was demonstrated that the Wnt signaling pathway – an evolutionarily conserved pathway that regulates certain aspects of cell fate determination, cell migration, and cell polarity, among other things – was essential both for tissue repair and stem cell development in other parts of the body like the skin, brain, and intestines.